Well, I am home from the Easter weekend. Yesterday morning, I ate four hot cross buns at one sitting, and followed it with obscene amounts of chocolate and jelly beans. As the sole hider this year for the family egg hunt, I hid no fewer than five dozen hard-boiled eggs (all colored, of course), and two dozen plastic Easter eggs filled with goodies.
But my real battle with my family revolves around the “golden egg”. Five years ago, in 1999, my beloved aunt decided that it would be fun to have a “golden egg” (a regular plastic egg filled with cash instead of chocolate) as part of the traditional hunt. Of course, the results have been predictable ever since. While the very small children (under five) remained enchanted by bright and shiny objects in the grass, the slightly older hunters (who range from six to twelve) are obsessed with finding this one particular egg. Once it has been found, they lose all interest in searching for the remaining hard-boiled or chocolate eggs. The other adults in my family seem to find the enthusiasm that the golden egg generates to be cute; I find it infuriating.
I know full well that Easter egg hunts (as they are conducted in this country these days) are an amalgam of a variety of pagan traditions. (Any detailed search on the web will provide you with all you need to know about the origins of the holiday). There is certainly nothing Christian about the egg hunt. But somehow, to me at least, hunting for a $5 or $20 bill seems, if possible, less Christian than hunting for other sorts of eggs. I suppose I am rapidly becoming one of those sentimental types who wants to avoid particularly crass displays of materialism even while participating in what is an inherently materialistic and crass event!
In any case, I was able to limit the number of golden eggs to one (some in my family wanted multiple golden eggs) and to limit the amount within to $5 (the lowest ever). Small satisfaction, yes, but satisfaction nonetheless!
When I was a little kid, we had rules for Easter egg hunts to make them more fair. I can’t remember if any of the eggs had money in them, but there were some eggs that were larger than others. We were told that we could each only collect x number of big eggs and y number of little eggs, so that we all had the same number. Additionally, us older kids (once there were little ones) were restricting to collecting eggs above waist level, so that the little kids could find them. After the big kids had collected our allotment, we had a blast helping the little kids find theirs. Anyway, my family is big on rules like that.
Were these eggs all plastic? The rules issue is a controversial one in my family, and the size issue would need to be tailored to the near-uniformity of the hard-boiled “real” eggs.
have you ever had the problem of not finding all the eggs? My family always used plastic eggs with candy b/c my parents were afraid we wouldn’t find the hard-boiled eggs, leading to a stink. We always had a small number of eggs in baskets by our door when we woke up, and some of these would be hard-boiled.
As for the golden egg, I’m with you. I don’t like that idea.
I went to a sunrise service yesterday, where we were invited to come to the church for breakfast and a hunt for Easter symbols.
Well, we do do a count — and I marched around the grounds pretty carefully yesterday; I found not a single undiscovered egg. We have, in the past, found an egg from the previous year during egg hunts… yuck.
The eggs in our hunt were all plastic. I’m not sure why, but it might have been because I hate eggs and threw a fit when I was little or something. We would hard boil eggs as a family and dye them and I enjoyed that, but left them for others to eat. They just sat in the fridge until someone wanted one. And now that I’ve been thinking about this most of the day, I’m pretty sure the big plastic eggs had change in them. A nickel here, a dime there.
A few times for church we did Easter egg hunts where inside the plastic eggs was something that corresponded to the story of the crucifiction or ressurection. Then we’d open the eggs and tell the story.
Two thoughts.
First, the “golden egg” is an interesting manifestation of a cultural process that I’m slowly trying to monitor and understand: the drive for “grand prizes” and the valorization of first place over simple success. And, of course, the privileging of economic gain over gains of any other kind (there’s an interesting game theory question here, too: how much money has to be in the golden egg for it to be worth passing up the other eggs and candy? If the prize is small, then the searchers would get more out of vigorously accumulating small values which added up to larger totals.)
Second thought: anyone been to a Passover Seder recently? The tradition of hiding the afikomen, making the children search for it, then “redeeming” it (aka “ransom”) so that it can be used to conclude the seder is, as near as I can tell, one of the truly universal Jewish practices. Our family tradition, as I remember it, was that the actual finder got a bonus, but all the searchers shared in the profits; other families take a less socialist approach. But there’s always a redemption. I don’t know if there’s supposed to be any religious symbology in the practice (I’m sure someone has attached some by now: we do that a lot) but it’s quite ubiquitous.